Axios Head Exemplifies Media Denial of Its Own Part in Public’s Rejection

“Axios CEO rages against Musk’s ‘bulls—‘ claims that X users ‘are the media now’,” Fox News reported Tuesday.

“[Jim] VandeHei delivered a fiery speech in response on Thursday as he was honored, along with his Axios co-founder Mike Allen, with the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award,” the story elaborates. That these people are giving themselves journalism awards at a time when his own company reports “Americans’ trust in media plummets to historic low” shows a special kind of tone deafness.

But he’s not done:

“I hate this damn debate about, like, ‘Oh, we don’t need the media,’” the Axios CEO said, later arguing that, for journalists, ‘Everything we do is under fire.”

“Elon Musk sits on Twitter every day, or X today, saying, like, ‘We are the media! You are the media!’ My message to Elon Musk is: ‘Bulls—. You’re not the media.’” he said to applause.”

If corporate journalists are under fire, whose fault is that? The amplification of establishment talking point narratives across all platforms, along with the suppression of thought unique to alternative media, is why. No group is more aware of that than gun owners, who, daily, see the way the public is bombarded with misinformation and disinformation  that scarcely hides an agenda bias for citizen disarmament.

Take Axios, for instance. That’s Greek for “worthy of,” and in that calls to mind two relevant aphorisms: For “progressives” every day is Opposite Day, and the famous consensus on Pravda and Izvestia.

Without ever setting out to establish an archive of examples, one has emerged on my The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance blog. Stories linked to there include examples of Axios:

• Claiming “GOP Is Lying About the Southern Border Being Open.”
• Asserting the presidential election “could take days to call.”
• Giving misleading crime statistics Pete Buttigieg spread.
• Telling readers “Voters trust Harris more than Trump on economy.”
• Spreading Biden propaganda with no counterargument that the sale of semiautos is “sick.”

We could go on, but the point is made. To paraphrase Rhett Butler, Axios and the media in general should be under fire, and often, and by people who know how. But VandeHei, doubling down on the arrogance that makes people hate the media (just not enough yet), vents his fury at alternatives the public is turning to more and more.

It recalls for me two other examples of such arrogance that were personal.

One was Fox News’ resident Democrat apparatchik Juan Williams contemptuously dismissing Michelle Malkin as “just a blogger,” and her brilliant rejoinder:

Thank god for the BLOGGERS who broke open the #fastandfurious scandal & paved the way for #realreporters to follow.

What colleague, friend, and citizen journalist, the late Mike Vanderboegh and I had to go through to get them to do that is another story the mainstream will never cover, and is (again) only available from the Internet Archive.

The other took place years earlier, at an anti-gun PR  event at my local park where Sarah Brady appeared with anti-gun congresswoman Jane Harman. I went there to get the story for our local gun group’s newsletter and was promptly approached by a police official. He let me know in no uncertain terms that questions would only be tolerated if asked by recognized members of the press.

That’s where I came up with the term “Authorized Journalists,”  followed a few years later with “Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists,” and more recently with the DSM, a play on “MSM” that stands for Duranty/Streicher Media (named after The New York Times’ Moscow Bureau Chief Walter Duranty, known as “Stalin’s apologist” for covering up the genocidal Holodomor famine in Ukraine, and Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher.)

That may seem harsh for the average narrative parroting “reporter” who doesn’t know the first thing about firearms, but who nonetheless poses as an authoritative voice when injecting terms like “gun violence” and “military-style assault weapons” to spook low information readers into yearning for more bans. But the people paying them know exactly what they’re doing.

When we see it happening with things we know, like guns, it’s fair to question what else were being gaslighted on.

Enjoy being “under fire,” Mr. VandeHei.  You  and your counterparts have earned every bit of the distrust coming your way. Hopefully reports of MSNBC and CNN cratering their viewership will hold, and yeah, it would be a hoot if Elon Musk bought MSNBC.

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.